Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [75]
The number led to a distributor, who in turn said he had shipped the pistol to Guns Unlimited. By eleven o’clock that night, Rowley, another agent, and Detective Adams were at Curtis Williams’s door.
Williams went to jail. As far as federal law was concerned, however, Guns Unlimited did nothing wrong when it sold the Cobray to Williams, even under such obviously suspicious circumstances. Williams had shown the appropriate identification and had filled out form 4473 properly, dutifully writing “no” after every background question on the form.
No one thought to investigate Guns Unlimited, not even after the negligence suit filed by the family of Karen Farley yielded a judgment against the dealership early in 1992.
“We’re always looking for, and sensitive to, violations of federal law, regardless of who may be the individual or entity involved,” Rowley told me. “In this case, no, we did not go back and reinvestigate. Nothing that came up during the investigation of Williams pointed to wrongdoing on the part of Guns Unlimited.”
But clear evidence that a dealer willfully, knowingly broke federal firearms laws can be hard to come by, said David Troy, special agent in charge of the Falls Church division and Rowley’s boss.
“We don’t make very many dealer cases,” Troy said. “Not because we can’t catch them. There just aren’t many dealers who are really knowingly and willfully violating the law. But what you do have is this: you have a lot of dealers who are satisfying the letter of the law when they sell the gun, regardless of how suspicious the sale might look to a reasonable person. But they’re not culpable under the law for that sale.”
Troy decries the unimpeded proliferation of guns, but cautions that America’s gun crisis has deeper, more intractable roots. “The fact there are guns out there is not in itself inherently bad, because a lot of people who have guns never do anything wrong with them. The problem is there are so many people out there who want to get a gun and use it in an illegal manner. If there weren’t so damn many firearms out there, it would make things a little bit better. But we’re talking shades of gray, here. If we had only fifty million guns instead of two hundred million, would we have less violent crime in the United States? Probably not. Because fifty million is still a hell of a lot of firearms. The point is, there are so many weapons available in the United States, and so easily obtained through legal or illegal channels, that anyone who wants a firearm can get one. Therefore, you have a hell of a lot of people who are willing to use them in a criminal manner who can get their hands on them without any exertion whatsoever.”
Troy thinks something fundamental changed in American culture to make the nation more tolerant of guns and gun violence. “I don’t know why it’s accepted the way it is. Maybe it’s like anything else. You get used to it over a period of time. If the country went from a thousand homicides to twenty-five thousand in one year, we’d have a revolution on our hands. But it’s gradually built up to where we do have twenty-five thousand homicides every year. It’s taken four or five generations to get there, and people have gotten used to the idea. It’s an alarming thing but it’s not a statistic that makes anyone do anything on a grand scale. It’s a cultural thing, a value system situation.
“Guns have become so common, so acceptable, that kids know them the way you and I used to know cars. When I was a teenager, I could name every car by looking at it. I could say that’s a ’58 Ford, that’s a ’59 Chevy. Kids today can name guns. They know them by looking at them. They can pick them out just like teenagers were able to pick out cars twenty-five years ago.”
Nicholas Elliot possessed this skill. But how did he come by it? How does America’s gun culture foster this awareness and our tolerance of gun violence? Is tolerance even